Devil's Harbor (23 page)

While he waited, he leaned against the bow rail and watched the fishermen work. Down on the beach, the smaller boats unloaded whatever they had managed to hook on their lines. Finn looked through the binoculars to see what they'd brought in: a few wahoo and yellowfin, some sea bass and dorado. He put down the binoculars and turned his attention to the shrimpers on the dock. There were five of them, none of them over thirty feet long. The men were unloading white plastic buckets laden with the morning's catch onto the dock. The buckets had the names of the boats they belonged to painted on their sides. Finn was taken aback when he saw that one of the boats was called
La Abuelita
. He put the binoculars back in the wheelhouse and wandered down the dock. When he got closer, he saw
DUEÑO: FELIPE GAVRILIA
painted on the stern of the boat, followed by what looked like a license number.

He didn't know what
due
ñ
o
meant, but he knew that Mrs. Gavrilia was known by the nickname La Abuelita. And he remembered how she'd said her fisherman-cousin was named Felipe.

He approached the man unloading shrimp. He was a thin, wiry man in a dirty blue Adidas T-shirt, probably in his sixties, with deep wrinkles and skin darkened by the sun. He looked like a man who'd worked hard all his life.

“Se
ñ
or Gavrilia?” Finn tried.

The guy ignored him and kept working.

Finn really wished he'd made more of an effort to learn Spanish at Saint Augustine. He just wasn't good in classrooms.

“I'm a friend of La Abuelita? In Los Angeles? Your cousin?”

Nothing from the guy.

“She told me about your son? The one who disappeared?”

Still nothing. The man kept working, as though Finn weren't there.

“I'm the man who stopped the boat you said your son went on. I'm with
la migra
up in California. Do you remember the boat?
La Catrina
?”

As soon as Finn said the name, the man stopped in his tracks. He looked long and hard at Finn. Then he turned and let his eyes linger on a building on the shore, as though drawing Finn's attention to it. Finn followed his gaze. The man was looking at a boatyard. It was a ramshackle affair. Several boats in various states of disrepair sat on the beach outside a large shed with a high corrugated roof. The boats didn't look like they were going anywhere anytime soon. There was no ramp into the water, just a trailer on a cable system to haul boats up the beach and into the shed. Finn turned to thank Felipe Gavrilia, but the old fisherman had already turned away.

He walked down the beach to the boatyard. The big sliding door into the shed was open. Finn saw a small shrimper sitting on a cradle, her rudder off. He heard the crackle of a gas welder from the back of the shed and recognized the pungent, ozone smell that welders give off.

He walked deeper into the shed, past the trawler, toward a workbench at the back. A man in gray coveralls was busy working on something hidden from Finn's view.

“Hello,” said Finn loudly.

The man wheeled around, looked at Finn through the dark rectangle of glass in his helmet. He killed the burn on his welder and flipped up the visor. He looked unhappy to see Finn.

“S
í
?”
he said.

“
La Catrina
. Know it?”

The guy looked at him steadily. Shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

Finn noticed what was on the workbench. It was a fire extinguisher. The top had been cut off and was now being welded back on, its dome clamped into place over the cylinder, weld marks along the join. His mind flashed back to the fire in
La Catrina
's engine bay. He remembered how the extinguisher he'd found aboard had failed. He looked to his right and saw dozens of fire extinguishers standing in the corner—some cut open, some welded back together but with their red paint missing and their weld marks visible, some with their weld marks ground down but yet to be painted, and some that looked like ordinary fire extinguishers.

He marveled at the simplicity of it: fire extinguishers were so ubiquitous aboard boats as to be invisible.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the welder flipping his mask back down. The torch switched on with a blinding flash of light.

Oxyacetylene burns at six thousand degrees. The mechanic would've seared off Finn's face if he hadn't scurried back in the nick of time. Finn kept scurrying and the mechanic kept coming at him until the hoses from the tanks feeding his torch were fully extended. Then the guy hesitated, unsure what to do next. Finn didn't—he turned and ran out of the shed.

Outside, a police car was pulling up at the road leading to the dock, and for a microsecond Finn was relieved. Then he remembered that Perez had been a cop.

He pirouetted and ran back into the shed, where the mechanic had ditched his mask and traded his torch for a heavy riveting mallet.

For a few short seconds, Finn and the mechanic danced around each other, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Then the mechanic swung double-handed at Finn's head. That was a mistake. Finn ducked the swing and the weight of the mallet pulled the mechanic off-balance, giving Finn time to deliver a four-shot combo, two body blows to the kidneys, then two hard uppercuts, one-two-one-two, like that. The mallet flew out of the guy's hands and with a clang hit the trawler's hull, and the guy stumbled back from the force of Finn's hits. This time, Finn took the offensive and glided in on light feet and finished him with a single, perfect neck-snapping jab. The mechanic crumpled and lay still.

Finn heard the policemen's voices outside getting nearer. His eyes searched the shed for another exit and found none.

He looked at the shrimper, picked up the mechanic's body, lifted him high like a lucha libre fighter, and flung him into the boat, making sure he was out of sight behind the freeboard. Then he ran back to the bench, pulled the welding mask over his face, his heavy breathing fogging up the glass, and switched on the torch.

A second later, he heard the cops walk in. Finn turned to face them. There were three of them. One of the cops was pushing a wheelbarrow. The other two had AR-15s slung over their shoulders.

Acting like he wasn't surprised to see them, Finn went back to his work and focused on welding the dome back onto the cylinder.

The cops walked up and said something to him in Spanish. He nodded and hoped to God it was just banter and they would go about their business.

The cop with the wheelbarrow pulled up and started unloading bricks of plastic-wrapped narcotics onto the workbench. He said something to Finn that made the other cops laugh.

Finn nodded vaguely, kept welding, kept breathing deeply beneath his mask, trying to slow his heart and the release of cortisol in his brain.

Once they'd unloaded all the bricks from the wheelbarrow, the cops heaved four of the finished extinguishers onto it.

Finn kept welding.

Two of the cops started moving toward the exit.

The third one, a guy with buck teeth who made spitting sounds when he spoke, kept speaking at Finn. He was getting impatient, like he was expecting an answer.

Finn steeled himself.

The cop motioned to Finn to take off his mask. Finn didn't move. Then, when the cop started raising his gun, Finn rammed the welding torch into the cop's face. The sickening smell of burned flesh filled his nostrils and the cop's brutalized scream echoed around the boat shed. Finn dropped the torch, grabbed the barrel of the AR-15, and kicked the screaming cop away.

He flipped the gun around so that the business end was pointed at the two remaining cops. The one with the wheelbarrow was frozen to the spot. The one with the other AR-15 already had its stock to his shoulder. Finn dropped to a knee.

The cop fired first but fired high—a quick burst,
rat-tat-tat,
the weapon spitting shells, the shells clattering to the ground, rounds ricocheting off the wall above Finn.

Finn pulled the trigger and the cop's chest exploded red. He immediately swung the weapon onto the third cop, who had abandoned the wheelbarrow and was scrambling for his holstered weapon. Finn looked at him along his barrel and shook his head. It should've been obvious to the cop that he was never going to beat Finn. What he should've done was drop his handgun and put up his hands. Instead, he went for his weapon. He died with a surprised look on his face.

All three cops lay still. Finn realized he was still wearing the welder's mask. He took it off now and looked around. His heart was racing. The oxyacetylene cylinders gave him an idea. First, he turned off the valves on both cylinders and unscrewed the regulators. Then he hauled the two tanks up the rolling steps, dumped them on their sides in the trawler's small cabin, and opened their valves to full. Then he closed the door, sealing the cabin, and hustled out of there.

He quickly patted down the pockets of the dead gangsters for spare clips for the two AR-15s, flung both weapons on top of the extinguishers in the wheelbarrow, took the third cop's handgun, then pushed the wheelbarrow hard to the exit, stopping only to pull the sliding door shut behind him.

“Fuck you, Caballeros,” he said to no one in particular. He pushed the wheelbarrow as fast as he could down the beach, past the cop car, past the shrimpers on the pier, back to the
Pacific Belle.
All the fishermen, he noticed, had disappeared.

At the far end of the dock, he saw Linda walking up the gangplank, leading the little girl from the orphanage by the hand. The two of them turned and gave him astonished looks.

That's when he felt the heat and the force of the boatyard exploding behind him.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Finn pushed west, away from Escondido, at top speed—fourteen knots. The
Belle
wasn't comfortable with it. Her engine thumped angrily and her hull pitched and rolled at every opportunity, but Finn didn't care. He wanted to get as far away as he could from Escondido as quickly as possible. From his position at the wheel, he glanced through the rear window every now and then at the column of black smoke rising from where the boatyard had been, keeping a watch for any craft putting to sea from the beach or the dock.

He knew that he'd stirred up a hornet's nest behind them, and he didn't like what he was seeing ahead, either. The wind had picked up and veered to the southwest, blowing strong onshore and sending white horses scudding across the outer bay. It wasn't a good sign: the wind hardly ever blew from that direction at this time of year or any other. He tried to get a weather update on the radio, but of course he was too far south to receive the NOAA's weather bulletins, and he wouldn't have been able to understand the Mexican equivalent even if he had known where to find it on the dial.

One of the AR-15s was hanging by its strap from his shoulder. Linda had put the extinguishers in their appropriate cradles: two in the engine room, one in the cabin, one in the wheelhouse.
Let's hope we don't have an actual fire aboard,
thought Finn.

He looked at Linda and the child she had brought with her, the two of them sitting on the bench by the chart table, the kid staring at Finn and Linda staring at the kid like she was the second coming. The girl was swamped in a raggedy, adult-size green sweatshirt that Linda had pulled out of somewhere. She'd also found the time to spread peanut butter and jelly on two white slices and put them on a plate in front of the kid, along with some cookies and a glass of long-life milk.

Finn watched the kid eat. She had long black hair parted right down the middle. She was small and slender. Her large, dark eyes looked out from her copper face at Finn with such placid incuriosity that he felt abashed by his own post-firefight, adrenaline-charged twitchiness. She ate everything slowly and deliberately. He figured she was no more than nine or ten years old. He had the feeling he'd seen her somewhere before. Linda stroked her hair.

“You know her name?” he said.

“Navidad,” said Linda.

“What happened to her parents?”

“The Caballeros set up the orphanage for their enemies' children.”

Finn suppressed a laugh. The Knights of Christ, princes of charity.

“Is that why you went down there this morning? To find her?”

“The way the Aztecs sacrifice children to their gods … it's so barbaric,” said Linda. “You can imagine what the Caballeros do with girls like her. I wanted to help her. As a kind of restitution, you know? For all the harm I've done trying to save Lucy.”

No,
thought Finn,
I don't know.
He looked at Navidad again, thinking how familiar she seemed. Then it clicked. “That was her last night in the play,” he said.

Linda nodded. He tried an awkward smile on the child. She stared at him impassively, chewing on her sandwich.

“She speak English?” he said.

Linda shook her head.

“I gotta be straight with you, Linda. You bring some poor kid into the middle of all this … on a whim? I just don't get it,” he said.

“You're not a parent. I don't think you
can
get it.”

“You're probably right, but try me anyway.”

Linda lit a cigarette. “Last night, when I was watching the children on the stage, I kept thinking of Lucy. Lucy might be sick, but she has me. She has a
mother,
a
parent,
and that makes her lucky, you know? Doesn't matter if she's sick, I'm there to look after her, me and her aunt. Both of us, we would do anything for Lucy. Rhonda doesn't have any children of her own, so she adores her. But these children in the orphanage, they've got no one. Navidad's got no one. That play last night? It may've been make-believe, but it broke my heart. I thought,
The Caballeros will sacrifice her eventually.
Not on an altar to the gods, but in some brothel on the border. I wanted to save her from that. I thought, if I can do something, I should. And then this morning, sitting on the balcony watching the kids, I saw her sitting quietly in the yard all on her own, and it hit me: I
can
do something. So I went down there and I bought her.”